Scarecrow (9 page)

The two bounty hunters whirled to face each other, shocked.

Big Drabyak said, ‘But there can't be . . .'

‘Oh, yes,' Delacroix said, ‘according to my records here, Mister Yousef Nazzar was imprisoned in the United Kingdom in 1999 on minor weapons importation charges. A sample of his blood was taken in accordance with the UK's prisoner-intake DNA policy.'

As Big Drabyak shouted for him to stop, Monsieur Delacroix injected a hypodermic needle into the left cheek of the blackened head in front of him and extracted some blood.

The blood was then placed in an analyser attached to Delacroix's computer.

Another beep.

A bad one.

Delacroix frowned—and suddenly his face took on a far more dangerous complexion.

‘Gentlemen . . .' he said slowly.

The bounty hunters froze.

The Swiss banker paused, as if he was
offended
by the indiscretion. ‘Gentlemen, this head is a forgery. This is not the head of Yousef Nazzar.'

‘Now wait a minute—' Big Drabyak began.

‘Please be quiet, Mister Drabyak,' Delacroix said. ‘The cosmetic surgery was quite convincing; you employed a good plastic surgeon, that much is certain. The burning of the head to remove visual identification, well, that is clever but old. And the restructured teeth were very well faked. But you didn't know there was a DNA record, did you?'

‘No,' Big Drabyak growled.

‘The Rosenthal head was also a fake, then?'

‘It was obtained by an associate of ours,' Big Drabyak lied, ‘and he assured us that it was—'

‘But
you
have presented it to me, Monsieur Drabyak, therefore it is your responsibility. Let me be clear. Honesty, in this moment, may help you. Is the Rosenthal head also a fake?'

‘Yes,' Drabyak grimaced.

‘This is a grave offence against the rules of the hunt, Mister Drabyak. My clients will not tolerate attempts to deceive them, you do understand that?'

Big Drabyak said nothing.

‘Fortunately, I have instructions on this,' Delacroix said. ‘Monsieur Drabyak the Elder. The passageway in which you are standing, do you know what it is?'

‘No.'

‘Oh, yes. How silly of me to forget, you are American. You know nothing of world history except the name of every US President and the capital of every US state. A knowledge of medieval European warfare would be somewhat beyond you, no?'

Big Drabyak's face was blank.

Delacroix sighed. ‘Monsieur Drabyak, the tunnel in which you now stand was once used as a trap to ensnare those who would attack this castle. When enemy soldiers came through that passageway, boiling oil would be flushed into it through the gutters in its walls, killing the intruders in a most painful way.'

Big Drabyak snapped to look at the walls of the stone passageway around him. They were indeed pockmarked with a series of basketball-sized holes high up near the ceiling.

‘This castle, however, has been modified slightly,' Delacroix said, ‘in keeping with modern technology. If you would observe your brother.'

Big Drabyak spun, and stared wide-eyed through the perspex window in the steel door that separated him from his younger brother.

‘Now. Say goodbye to your brother,' Monsieur Delacroix's voice said over the speakers.

In the office, Delacroix lifted his handheld remote again and pressed another button on it.

Immediately, an ominous mechanical humming noise emanated from the stone walls of Little Drabyak's circular ante-room.

The humming noise gathered intensity, getting faster and faster and faster.

At first Little Drabyak seemed unaffected.

Then with frightening suddenness, he convulsed violently, snapping a hand to his chest, to his heart. Then he clutched his ears—a moment before they spurted hideously with blood.

He screamed.

Then, as Big Drabyak watched, the most horrifying thing of all happened.

As the humming noise hit fever-pitch, his little brother's
chest
just burst open, his whole rib cage blurting outward in a disgusting spray of blood and gore.

Little Drabyak dropped to the floor of the anteroom, his eyes vacant, his rib cage blasted apart. Dead.

Delacroix's voice: ‘A microwave defence system, Monsieur Drabyak. Très effective, no?'

Big Drabyak was thunderstruck.

He spun where he stood, powerless to escape.

‘You little fuck! I thought you said honesty would help!' he yelled.

Delacroix laughed. ‘Americans. You think you can plea-bargain your way out of anything. I said it might help. But on this occasion, I have decided that it will not.'

Drabyak glanced at his brother's grisly remains. ‘Is that what you're going to do to me?'

Monsieur Delacroix smiled. ‘Oh, no. Unlike you, I am an admirer of history. Sometimes, the old ways are the most satisfying.'

And with that the Swiss banker hit a third and final button on his remote . . .

. . . and 1,000 litres of boiling oil sprayed out from the wall-holes in the tunnel containing Joe Drabyak.

Any exposed flesh was burned on contact—all the skin on his face was scalded in a second. Wherever the boiling oil touched his clothes, it simply melted them to his body.

And as the oil felled him, Drabyak screamed. He would shriek and cry and wail until he was dead, but no-one would hear him.

Because the Forteresse de Valois, mounted on its high rocky pinnacle overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, hanging off the edge of the Brittany coast, lay 20 miles from the nearest town.

 

DEEP IN THE HINDU KUSH MOUNTAINS AFGHANISTAN–TAJIKISTAN BORDER 26 OCTOBER, 1300 HOURS LOCAL TIME (0300 HOURS E.S.T. USA)

It was like storming the gates of hell.

Lieutenant Elizabeth Gant's eight-wheeled Light Armoured Vehicle kicked up a tornado of dust and dirt as it sped across the 200 yards of open ground that protected the entrance to the terrorist cave system.

An absolute storm of bullets hammered the ground all around the speeding LAV as it wended its way toward the cave entrance, covered by an overhead artillery barrage of its own.

This was the Allies' fifth attempt to get troops into the cave system—a converted Soviet mine known to be harbouring Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, Hassan Zawahiri, and about two hundred heavily-armed Al-Qaeda terrorists.

More than a year after the Taliban regime had been ousted from Kabul—and even though a far more public war had since been waged and won against Saddam Hussein in Iraq—Operation Enduring Freedom still raged in the darkest places of Afghanistan: the caves.

For the final annihilation of Al-Qaeda could not be achieved until all the terrorist caves had been cleared, and that involved a kind of warfare not suitable for viewing on CNN or Fox. A down-and-dirty variety of fighting. Hand-to-hand, man-on-man cave-hunting.

And then just this week, US and UK forces had found this cave system far in the north of the country, straddling the Afghan–Tajikistan border—the most important terrorist cave base in Afghanistan.

It was the core of the Al-Qaeda network.

An abandoned Soviet coalmine once known as the Karpalov Mine, it had been converted by Osama bin Laden's construction company into a labyrinthine network of hiding caves: caverns in which terrorists lived and worked and in which they'd stored a veritable arsenal of weapons.

It also came with an extra defence mechanism.

It was a methane trap.

Coal gives off methane—a highly flammable gas—and methane levels of 5% are explosive. One spark and it all goes up. And while the inner sections of the abandoned mine were supplied with fresh air from chimney-like vents, its outer extremities were filled with methane.

In other words: invading soldiers couldn't use guns until they arrived at the core of the mine.

One thing was certain: the terrorists who had withdrawn to this cave system were not going to give up without a fight. Like Kunduz the previous year and the bloodbath at Mazar-e-Sharif, this was going to be a fight to the death.

It was Al-Qaeda's last stand.

The mine's entrance was a reinforced concrete archway wide enough for large trucks to pass through.

The sharply-sloping mountainside above it was pockmarked with dozens of tiny snipers' nests, from which the terrorists covered the wide expanse of open ground in front of the entrance.

And somewhere up in the tangle of mountain peaks covering the mine were the openings to two air vents—twin 10-metre-wide shafts that rose like chimneys from the bottom of the mine, allowing fresh air into it. The terrorists had long ago covered the tops of these vents with camouflaged lids, so that they were invisible to spy planes.

Those vents were Gant's objective.

Capture a vent from inside the mine, blow its lid from below, and then send up a targeting laser that would be picked up by an overflying C-130 bomber, giving it a bull's-eye that it wouldn't miss.

The only thing left to do then was to get the hell out of the mine before a devastating 21,000-pound Massive Ordnance Air Burst (more commonly known as MOAB, the Mother Of All Bombs) was dropped down the chimney.

The first three attempts that morning to storm the tunnel system had been successful.

In each attempt, a pair of LAV-25s—eight-wheeled Light Armoured Vehicles—filled with Marines and SAS troopers had survived the hail of bullets and entered the cave.

The fourth attempt, however, had been a disaster.

It had ended with a terrible cross-fire of Russian-made rocket-propelled grenades—known to many as ‘LAV-Killers'—slamming into the two inrushing vehicles, killing all the men inside them.

Gant's was the fifth attempt, and it had entailed sending two high-speed decoy buggies into the gauntlet first, to attract the enemy's fire, after which Gant's two eight-wheelers had zeroed in on the cave entrance under cover of mortar fire targeted at the enemy's emplacements.

It had worked.

The speeding decoy buggies caught all manner of shit—automatic gunfire, RPGs that smashed into the ground all around them—while Gant's LAV-25 had burst forth from cover, closely followed by a second eight-wheeled beast.

The mountainside above the cave entrance had erupted in mortar impacts while the two LAVs had shot across the open plain before whipping into the entrance of the cave system, disappearing into darkness, out of the rain of gunfire and into a whole new kind of hell.

Elizabeth ‘Fox' Gant was 29 years old and a newly-minted First Lieutenant, fresh from Officer Candidate School.

Now, it wasn't often that a brand-new lieutenant was given command of a prized Recon Unit, let alone a stand-alone one, but Gant was something special.

Compact, blonde and fitter than many triathletes, she was a natural leader. Behind her sky-blue eyes lay a razor-sharp mind. Plus she already had two years' experience in a Recon Unit as an NCO.

She also, it was said in whispers, had friends in high places.

Some said that her rapid rise to Recon command had been the result of a recommendation from no less than the President of the United States himself. It had something to do, they said, with an incident at the US Air Force's most secret base, Area 7, during which Gant had shown her worth in the presence of the President himself. But that was conjecture.

The greatest recommendation, in the end, had come from a highly-respected Marine Gunnery Sergeant named Gena ‘Mother' Newman who had vouched for Gant in the best possible way: if Gant were put in command of a Recon Unit, Mother had said, then she herself would act as Gant's Team Chief.

At six-feet-two, with a fully-shaven head, one artificial leg and some of the most ruthless skills in the killing trade, Mother's word was gold. Her nickname said it all. It was short for ‘Motherfucker'.

And so Gant took command of Marine Force Reconnaissance Unit 9 one month before it shipped out for Afghanistan.

There was one other thing about Libby Gant worth noting.

For almost a year now, she had been the girlfriend of Captain Shane M. Schofield.

 

Schofield's newly acquired Yak-141 shot through the air at close to Mach 2.

It had been nearly five hours since his battle at Krask-8, and now, spread out before him and Book II, were the formidable Hindu Kush mountains.

And somewhere in them was Libby Gant—Potential Hostage No. 1 for anyone wanting Schofield's head.

Their Yak was almost out of gas. A quick pit-stop at an abandoned Soviet airfield in rural Kazakhstan had allowed them to refuel, but now they were running low on fuel again. They needed to find Gant soon.

Since he didn't trust anyone in Alaska any more, Schofield tuned his plane's radio to a very obscure US satellite frequency—the frequency of the US Defense Intelligence Agency.

After his identity had been verified, he asked to be put through to the Pentagon, to David Fairfax in the Cypher and Cryptanalysis Department.